Something else happens
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Lectionary readings:
August 24, Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16):
Exodus 1:8—2:10; Psalm 124
Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20
To listen to earlier homilies click here.
“We don’t see the world the way it is, we see the world the way we are.” Richard Rohr
Other Texts: Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps
Kathryn Schultz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
Draft copy of the homily—please do not cite without permission
Present your bodies as a living sacrifice…so that you may discern the will of God.
Discerning the will of God is one of those incredibly difficult things that we are each called to do.
St. Augustine says at the opening of his Confessions—one of the greatest meditations on discerning God’s will ever penned—
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
It is with those restless hearts that we set out discerning the will of God.
We’re also called as a community—as the Body of Christ, Paul says—to discern the will of God for our community.
Which means holding our convictions lightly, and being open and ready to really listen to another’s experience.
Even, and maybe especially, when it is very different from our own.
Because, as Paul reminds us, we are members of one another.
Of course we follow a “living” God, and anything that is living is always moving, changing, learning, breathing…
It’s tricky enough to discern the will of God for ourselves.
But it’s even harder to discern the will of God in community.
Because as brilliant, and insightful, and wonderful as we humans can be at times: we’re also self-centered and self-serving.
It’s hard for us to really see the world as it is…
We mostly see the world as we are.
Through the lens of our own broken, fragmented, wished for lives.
The new Pharaoh looks out over the land and sees a potential threat in the Israelites.
He sees the world as he is—through his fear and ignorance of “the other.”
And he’s not alone.
Jesus asks: “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”
And we hear the initial responses and think: well they’re obviously wrong.
Jesus was not John the Baptist, or Elijah, or Jeremiah…
But remember.
The disciples are responding from how they see the world—through the lens of Jewish prophets and messianic expectations.
Even then there wasn’t anything even close to a consensus in Judaism about the Messiah.
And it would be several more centuries of arguing, and animosity before there was anything even beginning to resemble a doctrine of the Incarnation, or the Trinity, or the dual nature of Christ—fully human & fully divine.
This passage isn’t a check on everyone’s orthodox understanding of who and what the Messiah is.
And this is clear in all of the Gospel accounts because everyone—including the disciples—is wrong about what God is doing in and through Jesus.
Peter is praised for his answer today, but next week he’ll be reprimanded for almost immediately misunderstanding what the Messiah is all about.
Peter thinks the Messiah is supposed to be one thing. And Jesus turns out to be something else.
Ira Glass, has said that all of the stories they tell on This American Life have a crypto-theme: “I thought this one thing was going to happen. And something else happened instead.”
The Good News—the Gospel of Christ—contains this same formula regarding the Messiah, our salvation, and the reconciliation of all creation to its creator: we all thought this one thing was going to happen.
And something else happens instead.
Pharaoh thinks it’ll be easy to control the Israelites by systematically eliminating all of their male offspring.
And something else happens instead.
The disciples think the Messiah is going to come in power and glory and restore the kingdom.
And something else happens instead.
Maybe we thought that by coming to faith God was going to take all of our pain and suffering away.
And something else happens instead.
Or maybe we were hoping that all the people like us were going to be saved, and all people we don’t like were going to be cast into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
And something else happens instead.
Seeing the world as we are—through the lens of our expectations, and desires, and fears—means we get surprised a lot when something else keeps happening.
It’s partly how we learn, but it also means we are wrong an awful lot of the time.
We should probably just admit it.
White people keep expecting race to no longer be an issue, and then another Ferguson happens.
We continue to be tragically blind and deaf to the experience of people of color.
Men have been wrong about the experience of women and the reality of sexism.
Straight people have been wrong about the experience of gays and lesbians.
Cisgendered people have wrong about trans-gendered people.
We’ve been wrong about poverty.
And education.
And incarceration.
And on and on and on.
We don’t see the world the way it is, we see it the way we are.
We too often get locked into this binary loop where we think “if they’re wrong, I must be right.”
Or, “If I’m wrong, they must be right.”
But those things are in no way dependent on one another.
My being wrong says nothing about you being right.
The world is way more complex than that.
And yet we are to present ourselves a living sacrifice so that we might discern the will of God—see through the eyes of faith—see the way God sees—see the hope God has for us and for our communities.
How do we do that?
It turns out Paul is really helpful here.
Listen to what he says: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God.
Do not be conformed to this world:
This world reinforces that “OUR” way of looking at the world (whichever one that is, but for us it’s primarily the system that says “money, power, and status are really the only things worth having”)—the world reinforces that “our way” is the only legitimate viewpoint there is.
“Our way” is innately superior to any other way.
“We” know and understand everything, because for “us” it is possible to be totally logical, rational, and objective. (Rohr, Breathing Underwater)
This is the world we are conformed to…
This is the glass through which we see darkly…
And Paul says, do not be conformed to this…
do not hold too tightly to this…
but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.
St Gregory of Nyssa way back in the fourth century said, “Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.”
Whenever we refuse the transformative power of God.
Whenever we insist that “this one thing is going to happen” we miss the new thing that God is doing instead.
And remember, one meaning of the word, “repentance”—metanioa—is to literally change your mind.
If there is anything positive that has emerged from the bad news of the last several months—and particularly the last week—it’s that more voices from outside the dominant way of seeing—more voices from the margins—are being heard.
Amid a lot of the noise and static there are clarion voices.
Women’s voices speaking about the everyday sexism they face.
African American voices speaking about the reality of living in a racist society.
Immigrant voices speaking about the terrors they’ve left behind and the struggles they have finding a new life.
As Christians we’re not called to agree with them, but because “we are members of one another,” we must listen to and honor those voices so that we may be transformed by the renewing of our minds.
Bishop Desmond Tutu taught the people of South Africa that before you get to reconciliation and healing you have to name and face the truth.
The problem is we see the world the way we are and thus we have different versions of what is “true.”
And the more we defend “our” version of the truth the more divided we become.
No matter how large or small the issue is.
What Bishop Tutu taught the people of South Africa is that while truth can be paradoxical—a white policeman and a black teenager will see and experience the truth of the world very differently—if we are willing to hear and absorb and honor someone else’s story—really see and hear them—with out defending our own pain, or anger, or grief we can begin to work towards reconciliation and healing.
I’ve often wondered if something like a Truth and Reconciliation Conversation on race or poverty or any of the other pressing issues we face isn’t desperately needed.
And it seems to me that the churches are (or could and should be) places where this kind of deep transformative work can take place.
After all, we’re to be the people who do not “think more highly of ourselves than we ought”
Who are supposed to understand that we all have “gifts differing” and honor and value those gifts.
Who proclaim that and that every “body” matters—that every life matters.
Who are called to open ourselves to transformation again and again…
Who are renewed again and again by the living, moving, breathing God who is constantly renewing, constantly calling us into deeper learning,into deeper relationship, into discovering who we really are; and what is truly good and acceptable and perfect.
Not as we see it or think it should be, but as God wills it.
Amen.